HUXLEY 35 



punishment having no assured basis of certain 

 knowledge, could not be used as the main motive 

 power in the conduct of life without in the end 

 doing harm, strongly as he felt that to go further 

 and put these forward as the necessary and indis- 

 pensable instruments in the moral government of 

 the world was, as he said in a letter to Charles 

 Kingsley, " a mischievous lie," this was not the 

 mainspring of that continued active opposition to 

 the Church which is displayed in so many especi- 

 ally of his later writings. That opposition was 

 engendered not so much by the kind of moving 

 power put forward by the Church as by the direc- 

 tive agencies through which the Church strove to 

 make that moving power effective for the conduct 

 of life. 



He, as I have said, had early come to the con- 

 viction that since the conduct of life, of moral as 

 well as physical life, must be guided by obedi- 

 ence to the laws of nature and by this alone, the 

 welfare of mankind hung upon the continued 

 progress of natural knowledge, through which 

 man learnt the laws which he must obey and saw 

 his way before him. But it seemed to him that 

 the Church in every one of its particular forms, in 

 framing rules for the conduct of life, now to a 

 greater, now to a lesser degree, had made in the 

 past, was making in the present, and would make 

 in the future, use of an appeal to a something 

 which, under the name of authority, inspiration, 

 revelation, was not only no part of natural know- 



